Domestic Affairs

The biggest domestic event in Germany in 2006 was undoubtedly the country’s hosting of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (soccer) World Cup, eventually won by Italy. (SeeSports and Games:Sidebar.) Although the run-up to the event was in part overshadowed by concerns about an apparent rise in violence toward foreigners, particularly in the east of the country, such concerns turned out to be unfounded. Not only was Germany’s hosting and organization of the event widely praised, but there were also suggestions that at least some German citizens increasingly felt able to take a degree of pride in their identity, which for a long time had been overshadowed by the legacy of Germany’s past.

Away from football, attention in the political sphere focused upon the reform attempts of the grand coalition of Germany’s two largest parties, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD). This coalition government had been formed after the incredibly close election result of September 2005. The list of policy challenges facing the coalition was extensive and included reform of Germany’s generous but expensive health insurance system; an overhaul of the federal system; changes to the corporate tax system; reform of the so-called Hartz IV legislation on unemployment benefits, introduced by the previous government; pension reform and the potential raising of the retirement age from 65 to 67; and the need to bring Germany’s annual budgetary deficit back within the criteria stipulated by the European Union.

The grand coalition enjoyed a substantial majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, as well as control of the Bundesrat, the chamber of federal state government representatives. As a result, smaller opposition parties—the Free Democrats, the Greens, and the Left—had little hope of overturning the federal government’s legislative proposals. Reaching agreement between the two coalition partners proved far from easy, however, and during the summer months the contentious debate within the government over proposals for the reform of the health insurance system threatened the survival of the coalition. Tensions became apparent not just between the two parties but also within them, especially within the CDU/CSU as Chancellor Angela Merkel came under pressure from the party’s so-called regional “barons”—those premiers of Germany’s constituent federal states that belonged to the CDU/CSU.

This debate, fought out largely in public during the summer, had clear negative implications for the popularity of both the chancellor and the CDU. Opinion polls in late summer and early autumn showed the party continually slipping in popularity, while the SPD gradually began to gain support after having suffered a dip in popularity in the early part of the year. Opinion polls also suggested that a growing number of German citizens did not believe that the grand coalition would last its full term in office. The chancellor’s personal popularity rating also fell, having started the year as Germany’s most popular chancellor ever—largely as a result of her perceived foreign policy successes—as questions were raised over her management of both the squabbling government coalition and her own fractious party.

Nevertheless, after a tardy introduction of the coalition’s reform plans, by the autumn a number of measures had been agreed upon. The slow start occurred because important elections were being held in three states in March—Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony-Anhalt. Defeat for the ruling administrations in any of these states could have spelled problems for the introduction of necessary reforms, particularly if they had further weakened the SPD after its poor state election results in 2005. The ruling majorities were maintained in each case, however, so after a four-month “honeymoon period,” by the end of March the grand coalition was tackling serious reform issues.

Among the decisions taken was the first part of the federal reform package, a piece of legislation requiring some 20 constitutional amendments, which was passed by both houses in July. The second part of the package, aimed at reforming Germany’s federal fiscal equalization system, was due to be negotiated in 2007. Agreement was also reached on a reform of the corporate tax system and an increase in tax rates for Germany’s highest earners.

An unpopular measure was the agreement to raise the official retirement age for German workers from 65 to 67 as a consequence of demographic pressures. The measure was to be phased in over the course of the next three years, though it would not apply to all categories of workers. The most difficult domestic policy issue for the government, however, proved to be the health insurance reform. Negotiations began in March and concluded in late September, with an uneasy compromise struck between the two coalition partners, which overrode dissension in the party ranks. The main sticking points were the very different conceptions of the two parties over how the insurance system should be funded and what role private health insurers were to play in the financing of the health care system.

In the state elections held in September in Mecklenburg–West Pomerania and Berlin, concern was once again raised by the electoral successes of the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD). In Mecklenburg–West Pomerania, Chancellor Merkel’s home state, the NPD achieved 7.3% of the vote and easily cleared the 5% barrier necessary to take up seats in Parliament. Mecklenburg–West Pomerania was one of Germany’s poorest regions, with an unemployment rate hovering around 18%, nearly twice the national average. The NPD also held state parliamentary seats in Saxony, and the German People’s Union (DVU), another party of the right, was represented in Brandenburg and in Bremen.

Security concerns were heightened in August when two undetonated explosive devices were found on trains in the west of the country. This discovery was followed by the arrest of a suspect based upon closed-circuit television footage. This unleashed a new debate in Germany about the balance between the safeguarding of civil liberties and the importance of ensuring security, a debate that grew to incorporate the political row over the introduction of an antiterrorism database for use by the German security services.

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